Smiling in adversity

President GMA and United States Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr. (who has wisely been keeping a very low profile lately) had an hour-long talk in the US envoy’s residence near John Hay in Baguio City Friday afternoon.

The dialogue, following a Christmas "program" put on by the Americans, concerned more serious topics, but inevitably the case of the just-exited Mark Jimenez came up. Enough, already. MJ is, thankfully, Florida’s problem today.

Where are MJ’s two "loyalists", his sidekick Bulacan Rep. Willie Villarama and Surigao del Sur Rep. Prospero Pichay now? Perhaps they’re still in Honolulu, where they landed when Continental Airlines flew on there from Guam. (Maybe they’re lost on the US mainland or on the way home?) The two legislators had found themselves left behind on the tarmac, when the extradited MJ was suddenly detoured from Agana, Guam, to Saipan, where he was turned over by the FBI’s Jim Nixon to four US Federal Marshals waiting for the detainee there. Since those four marshals didn’t know anything about Mark J. being such a big shot, they followed the "drill" with regard to detainees being transported – you know, handcuffs and probably leg irons.

There will be, to be sure, the usual bluster, angry speeches, and threats to take legal action by MJ’s congressional "friends" and supporters, but once Markie Baby boarded an American airline, accompanied by US security escorts, he became just Mr. John Doe, or Joe Blow, or Johnny Cross (even, retrospeaking, plain Mario Crespo), not the congressman from Manila’s sixth district. For all we know, those US marshals who took custody of him had never even been to Manila.

What gave me the laugh of the year was when one congressman furiously huffed on television, fuming against the use of hand-cuffs: "How can a legislator be a security risk?" I’m sure every viewer reacted to that remark with a loud guffaw. Maybe, in a flash of self-candor, even other congressmen.

Oh, well. With a few exceptions on whom MJ may have bestowed his blessings, almost everybody hopes he doesn’t do a Mark-Arthur. Y’know, that "I shall return" bit. Better still: I shall return the money.

* * *

That was a graceful farewell speech delivered by Spanish Ambassador Tomas Rodriguez-Pantoja at the despedida reception given at his residence Friday in North Forbes Park.

The envoy, who is returning to duties in the Foreign Ministry in Madrid, after a stay in Manila of only two years, said he had been in the foreign service for 25 years and been assigned to several countries, but the assignment he appreciated — and, yes, loved most – was his sojourn in the Philippines.

Now diplomats are supposed to say nice things about the people with whom they find themselves . . . er, stranded, or the capitals in which they are posted, but what struck us who listened to Don Tomas was that he appeared to speak from the heart.

The departing ambassador said things we haven’t heard lately about ourselves (much less expressed by ourselves). He asserted that the Filipino people were wonderful because "they have a philosophy of life and a sense of values that no longer seem to exist, even in my own country."

Now, he may have to deny, when he gets to Madrid, that he uttered that last remark, lest he get in trouble with his own ministry – but, again, maybe not. For Spaniards have always been the most cruelly witty about themselves and prone to self-irony regarding their mores, follies, and foibles.

What other nation could have so succinctly put the thought: En el pais de los ciegos, tuerpo es Rey (In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.) Or Compaomor’s sardonic maxim: Y es que en este mundo traidor, nada hay verdad ni mentira; todo es segun el color del crystal con que se mira. (In this treacherous world, nothing is true or false; all depends on the color of the glass through which one is looking.)

Obviously, Rodriguez-Pantoja views our nation through the prism of sincere affection. He said that Filipinos are warm, generous, true in their friendships, and – even in the darkest moments of tragedy and tribulation – manage to retain their smile. It is the Filipino smile on which the ambassador dwelt most of all. Even in suffering, and deepest pain, he said of Filipinos, "they continue to smile". It is, he implied, courage and endurance of the highest order.

I write only from faulty memory, since the envoy’s words were unscripted – but he has promised to write a letter of Adios to our nation which I’ll be happy to publish.

This is a time, I suppose, when kind words are most precious to us in the current period of self-doubt, disappointment, and an uneasy feeling of drift. Perhaps those words touched the hearts of those who heard them all the more poignantly because they recalled the virtues our fathers and mothers taught us, but which now seem to be submerged in a climate of crime, cupidity, cynicism and greed. It took a foreigner to remind us that these virtues still exist among the majority of our people, including the poorest of the poor.

In a true sense, although Jose Rizal retailed in full detail the oppressions of the Friars and the Spanish colonial overlords as well as the pettiness of the Insulares and the Peninsulares, and, finally, died at the hands of Spanish injustice, he, too, loved Spain, and the loftier ideals of Hispanidad.

Probably the reason Don Tomas loved Filipinos most of all the nations in which he labored, was that – intertwined with our Malay-Indonesian roots and Chinese bloodstrains – he recognized that Spanish phlegm which had, over the centuries, built empires of faith and gold, and destroyed other empires as well.

My late father, who grew up speaking only Ilocano and Spanish (he learned English only when he was 20, and in law school at the U.P.), used to invoke some terms repeatedly as a fact of everyday life: Palabra de honor, delicadeza, hogar and honradez. As a young politician, he founded an orgnization named Defensores de la Libertad, which no longer exists, but has been reborn in many other like associations.

* * *

In this dismal hour, it may be instructive to remember what had made Spain, in centuries past, a surprising superpower (all too soon to fade from over-reach, and perhaps the imbibing of more vino than veritas). It was the indomitable Spanish will to win over insuperable odds. Indeed, to sneer – often recklessly and foolishly – at insuperable odds.

The best (but also most cruel) example that comes to mind is that of Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who seized Mexico. It is well-recorded that when Cortés’s battle-hardened and exhausted band of men first came on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on November 7, 1519, they were agape at the sight. They found a vast metropolis of 200,000 people – a population twice the size of the largest European city of that day. A member of that Spanish expedition was later to enthuse in bedazzlement: "Those great towns and tenples and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream… It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of or dreamed of before!"

The Aztec civilization the conquistadores encountered was, as one writer Tony Allan pointed out, "the culmination of 3,000 years of continuous cultural development. The Aztecs, who founded Tenochtitlan in 1325, were heirs to a tradition that began in the mid-scond millennium B.C. with the Olmecs and was carried forward by a succession of peoples including the Zapotecs, Maya and Taltecs. their imposing cities, temples and palaces resembled in many ways those of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt."

The tragic irony, of course, was that what the Spanish "intruders" had marvelled at, they came to destroy – claiming the entire area for "Christianity" and the Crown, and toppling that "pagan" civilization, demonized in their chronicles as dabblers in human sacrifice.

And yet, in a sense, this is why Spain’s heritage endures, not only in Central and South America, but in our land. An Asian ambassador recently described it well: "What set Spain’s colonialism apart is that the Spaniards came not only to seize gold, but incongruously to save souls. This is why so many other colonial rulers of the past are reviled, while Spain’s legacy is venerated still by the same people who overthrew Spain’s rule."

When we were kids, we used to hear the expression: somos diferentes. The legacy of faith and phlegm, bequeathed by Madre España, is surely the reason why.

I trust that one of the traits we inherited is the capability to battle and overcome insuperable odds. Smiling, naturally, all the way.